Guest Post: The Evolution of Media Monitoring

News that VMS had filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy came as a shock to many people. VMS was a company with a long history and this final business move seemed to come out of nowhere.

However, the media monitoring sector has been changing and shifting for years.

In today’s guest post, Sean Morgan, CEO of of Critical Media, home to real-time broadcast monitoring service Critical Mention, takes a look at the evolution of media monitoring over the past few years. As we mentioned previously, Critical Mention is offering a trial period for VMS clients in need of monitoring services.

VMS made a name for itself in the broadcast intelligence market with a simple business idea: provide the world’s major brands with copies of VHS tapes the day after those brands were featured on the news. By the time Critical Mention entered that market in 2003, a paradigm shift had occurred in the market. Brands needed their news in real-time. Aggregate television became part of the “actionable news” category.

For corporate communications professionals, brands could now be alerted within moments of mentions on television and watch clips and share them in real-time. For broadcast intelligence companies that built their business as a service company, the time had come to build not just a technology capable of ingesting the world’s broadcast news feeds live, but to become technology companies first and foremost. The requirements were steep: an application, deployed globally, capable of ingesting over 35 hours of television a minute. Not all companies could survive after this big of a shift.

Even with these changes, the demands of corporate communications and public relations professionals continued to grow and evolve and now include monitoring not just broadcast, but print, blogs, online news, online video, Twitter, Facebook and more. In order for media monitoring companies to thrive and continue to grow, they must be able to adapt, innovate, and constantly add new features.

At the end of the day it all comes back to the fact that the only media monitoring companies that will survive are the ones whose core business is as a technology infrastructure company. Otherwise, as media continues to morph and change, more and more companies will be left behind.

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